Morality Tale

If you listen to your boyfriend and do drugs, you could wind up in pink boxers. Like, Ew!

LeeAnn Dobbs was framed. The 15-year-old Ironwood High School student showed up at Tent City to do a story about Sheriff Joe Arpaio's SMART Tents program for the school's television news show (note to oldsters: high schools have their own TV networks now) and ended up in the slammer. SMART, which stands for Shocking Mainstream Adolescents into Resisting Temptation, exposes naughty teens to the rigors of a night in Tent City, where they're forced to wear ugly jumpsuits and eat yucky sack lunches. But this ersatz correctional facility doesn't allow news cameras, and so, in order to file her story, Dobbs had to become a teen inmate in one of Arpaio's moldy old tents. She swears she's never going back.

New Times: How'd you end up tossed into Tent City?

LeeAnn Dobbs: I'm part of Teen Talk, which is like a show about real-life situations that happen to kids. I thought it would be cool to go to Tent City and show the kids at Ironwood what that was like. I went there to film the program, and ended up being in it. Which was, like, ew!

Emily Piraino

Scared even straighter: LeeAnn Dobbs

NT: You were tricked?

Dobbs: Well, yes. We showed up with our film equipment, and Sheriff Arpaio's people said, "You can't be filming the program, but you can be in it." They made our adviser take all the film equipment and lock it in her car. Then we got to Tent City, and they pulled out all the Ironwood kids except one boy and one girl, and that was me. Then they let us film part of our stay.

NT: You were hornswoggled. But you're a good girl!

Dobbs: I am. And now I know how the other half lives. It was a miscommunication on my teacher's part that got me in there, but it was cool. It was an experience, let me tell you.

NT: What happened?

Dobbs: We got lined up out front, and we had to stand with our nose on the back of the head of the person in front of us. That was weird. Then we had to be checked to make sure our shoes were tied properly, and we had to take off all our jewelry so we couldn't use it to hurt anyone once we were in there. Then they handed us our outfits, which were really bad. They were, like, striped, and on the back it said "Sheriff's Inmate."

NT: How do you look in horizontal stripes?

Dobbs: Bad. Jail outfits are very baggy. The real inmates had jumpers that were more, like, fitted. And we had to wear the pink boxers. This was bad. We wore them right over our street clothes.

NT: Not exactly runway material.

Dobbs: No. Then they walked us down through where the eating rooms were, and we ate a Sheriff Joe Arpaio meal. Actually, most of us just kind of moved the food around, and kind of picked at it. It was kind of, I don't know. Not what you'd think of as dinner, I guess.

NT: There was no salad course, I'm guessing.

Dobbs: Uh, no. It was stuff to make a turkey and cheese sandwich with. There were two plums, and some kind of orange-colored drink, and a package of these sort of vending machine crackers. It was, I don't know. You know? If you were really hungry, it might be good. Like if you were dying of starvation.

NT: But you knew you were only in there for a night, so all of this was more like being in a play?

Dobbs: To get the message through to the kids, the prison people treated us all like criminals. I was treated like a bad kid, just like the real bad kids who were going through the program. I started to sort of believe I'd done something awful that needed to be punished. But some of the kids' parents found them doing drugs, so they deserved to be there. I was sort of shocked because I went there just to film this thing and ended up being thrown into it. I wasn't planning to do, like, a reality show where I was there for 20 hours.

NT: Were you scared?

Dobbs: No, because I behaved. If you behaved, the prison people sort of left you alone. But some of the bad kids were getting mouthy. It was really awful. I can't imagine being in there for, like, a week. And I would never want to go to jail. You had to be escorted to the bathroom, you had to keep your hands visible all the time. There was no freedom.

NT: Well, just make sure you don't get caught selling heroin at lunch hour.

Dobbs: I'm not like that. I told you, I'm a good kid. Some of the other kids were there with a church group, and there were some there who got a class credit if they went through the Tent City program.

NT: What the heck kind of class is that?

Dobbs: I have no idea. Maybe they just wanted to know what it's like to be in jail. Which is awful, believe me. We were thrown in with kids who'd done drugs and got caught, or stolen something, or whatever. So many kids think that jail is no big deal, that it's nothing. Most of the kids there, jail didn't even faze them.